Farm land lease

Sounds like u might have a bit of bother if you have this land ''leased" for this period of time without a signed and stamped legal lease in place as these tenants could claim adverse possision if on your land longer than 12 years uninterupted and paying cash.Consult your solicitor before u proceed further or this could get seriously tricky.

Re adverse possession ,how do u prove that they paid you if they paid in cash?Its your word against theirs and will this bring up a taxation problem also if this cash income was not declared.A can of worms comes to mind

If the lads renting the land for the last number of years have been declaring it as rented on their single farm payment applications then they have acknowledged that they don't have any adverse entitlement over the property.

@lg123 I assume you ain't planning on put this land into forestry in the next 12 months or so. Therefore it might be an idea to slowly mention the subject with your tenants over the next few months so that they have about a year to prepare for the loss of the use of the land.

You won't know unless you try. If Revenue hear they will probably look for back tax; don't know if they are limited in years back they can go. Tenants are probably using land for SFP (now BISS) in which case their applications would show ground as rented/leased. If tenants signed a lease with you of 5 years minimum the rent would be tax free to you; that would be a good reason for asking them to sign a proper lease; an auctioneer could have these lease and could advise you generally - get one dealing with farm sales/leases.

No. Nothing to do with being lived in. In fact, Adverse possession was a mechanism used under Common Law to make sure that land could always be used. (The term they used is "seised", basically that someone had to be able to control it. The Common Law wanted to prevent an "abeyance of seisin")

But it would be unlikely to establish adverse possession on the details above. The "squatter" has to have had possession of the property, without permission, and adverse to the title of the legal owner. They have to have taken measures to exclude the legal title holder such as putting locks on gates or putting up fences etc. It can be difficult to establish adverse possession. Simple acts can be interpreted as the owner asserting their title, and once that title is asserted, the clock resets.

Only joking , but seriously if there's no contract, then I just a case of telling them that they won't be able to get the use of it next year. They might ask for another year to get something else sorted

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The piece that you have never seen animals on is probably just being used for the maps, so the stocking rate can be increased on other land the farmer has